Memorandum submitted by the National Heritage
Training Academy South West
1. My name is Stephen Davis and I am the
founding Chairman of NHTA SW, established in 2006. NHTA SW is
an innovative partnership solution to the severe shortage in vocational
training in traditional building skills and the business mentoring
skills associated with economic regeneration in the heritage sector.
We embrace traditional building skills, rural skills, landscape
studies, archaeology, and sustainability studies and address sector
needs from Key Stage 2 to Foundation Degree level.
2. BW is a founding partner of NHTA SW,
and its training delivery programme for the Cotswold Canals Partnership
with The Waterways Trust has been a key component in our start-up.
The programme has catalysed a working partnership agreement to
be put in place across the spectrum of college and heritage site
partners, enabling NHTA SW to develop a co-operative model that
overrides the competitive environment amongst providers that has
been a fundamental handicap in the heritage skills sector.
3. NHTA SW has sector support and funding
from ConstructionSkills and The Prince's Foundation for the Built
Environment, and has received additional project funding from
Foundation Degrees Forward, English Heritage, Gloucestershire
First/Rural Renaissance and The National Heritage Training Group.
4. We have a regional remit and chair the
South West Skills Partnership. At the time of writing we are negotiating
core funding support from SWERDA. We are the leading heritage
skills training initiative in the UK, in that we represent a worked-through
solution to the intrinsic weaknesses of the sector and have presented
innovation solutions that are being emulated in other regions.
5. The detailed outputs of the BW/CCP/WT
training project, which has catalysed partnerships with NHTA SW
elements including The Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester
College and Woodchester Mansion Trust, speak for themselves.
6. However, the drive to add qualifications
to the training of volunteers remains a high priority of NHTA
SW, and indeed our core mission is to marry the unique capacity
of what we have designated the "Living Classrooms" of
sites such as the canals with the formal classrooms of our schools,
colleges and universities. This partnership not only adds value
to two independent funding streams, but for the first time offers
progression routes and qualifications to the voluntary sector.
7. We have our first printed prospectus
in hand, and aim to express to students, school leavers and volunteers
alike the prospect of progression within a sector that has hitherto
been fragmented and all but invisible at career development level.
8. HRH The Prince of Wales, as Patron of
CCP and indeed of several other key partners in NHTA SW, and one
of its two principal sponsors, has been kept in touch with our
progress and taken a keen interest in it.
9. As Chairman of NHTA SW I have on several
occasions presented supporting evidence to potential funders such
as BLF on behalf of BW and the CCP. In turn I have received support,
advice and encouragement from Andrew Stumpf and Edd Moss of BW
which I have highly valued. I have found BW's enthusiasm and commitment
to the CCP project to be wholehearted and beyond reproach.
10. Of course I regret the economic circumstances
that have obliged BW to withdraw from the CCP project, believing
strongly that the regeneration of this entire district, of such
eminent historic amenity and indeed importance, is heavily contingent
of the unblocking of the arteries of our decayed canal infrastructure.
11. I regard it as a high priority to ensure
that there is an inheritance of good training practice from the
project, and ensure that the NHTA SW vision is embedded within
the continuing project to revive the Cotswold Canals. I shall
be urging Stroud District Council, with whom I have a close working
relationship, to take that view and do not believe it will be
resisted.
12. I shall be exploring ways of deepening
BW's engagement with NHTA SW for the benefit of the South West
region where BW has many investments and commitments in waterways.
Stephen Davis MA (Cantab) MPhil FRGS
www.nhtasw.org.uk
www.onebigroom.org.uk
March 2008
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